Jeff,
So how are the webservers being shut down? I am now using an init script to do this as the first step in server shutdown/restart. I was forced to address this issue because of Oracle and sshd. In RH8.0 sshd would shut down first, then Oracle would try to shut down. However since the webservers were still connected to Oracle, it would just sit there. In the past I would have to login via ssh and shutdown the webserver, thus allowing Oracle to stop. But since sshd was now shutting down first, I had to muck around with the init scripts.
That is when I realized that there was essentially no order in the shutdown of AOLserver, just relying on the server to kill everything. So now my first step is to run 'svc -d /service/*'. I'm not sure what the signals are in svc -d, but I haven't had a problem doing this. Maybe I should run a simple test and report back.
Anyway, that is the way I do it. I'm not sure how Don or you shutdown AOLserver during a reboot.